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Ukrainian IT Market 2015 – Research by Dou.ua

The Ukrainian IT market, valued over $5 billion, is one of the most important industries that generates almost 4% of the Ukrainian GDP. Unlike many industries that have experienced a sharp recession during 2014-2015, Ukraine’s IT sector has increased in numbers of total workforce, number of jobs, and the number of IT educational programs and trainings. A popular website for developers – Dou.ua – has done some research about the development of the Ukrainian IT market in 2015. Learn more about the final results in our blog post.

In this case, the Ukrainian IT market means only software and web development in Ukraine. Hardware sales, integration, and optimization services are not included in the final results.

Workforce

The total number of developers working in IT industry is approaching 90,000 specialists. According to research from the previous year this number was only 75,000 people, so it has increased by 20%. In other words, each month an incredible one thousand specialists join the IT industry.

25% of all IT specialists work in the top 25 IT companies.

According to the research, these top 25 companies employ almost 23,000 developers, so it’s a quarter of the total number. 14,000 specialists are employed in top 5 companies (16% of the market share). Bigger companies are growing slower than the rest of the market – 7% vs 20%. The majority of these big companies specialize in IT outsourcing services to customers in US and Western Europe.

Most companies are concentrated in 5 cities.

86% of all developers are working in the five biggest Ukrainian cities: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa. Besides that, almost half of all IT specialists are working and living in Kyiv.

English Knowledge

It is also great to know that the number of IT developers with Fluent English skills is increasing, and now it’s 40.2%. But the number of specialists with Intermediate level is also high – 38.6%. So these facts confirm that Ukrainian IT specialists can easily improve their tech knowledge and skills by reading foreign literature.

Jobs

The number of job postings is increasing constantly. For example, in September 2013 Dou.ua posted about 900 jobs with almost 1000 applications. In September 2015, the number of jobs posted was 1,500 with more than 4,000 applications. The number of jobs postings has increased by 60% and the number of applicants has increased by three times.

The increased number of applicants can be explained with the increased numbers of junior developers and those one who are searching for their first IT job. On average, one job posting receives about 6 applications. But junior jobs, QA, and PM receive many more than senior jobs, For example, jobs of middle and senior levels receive approximately 4-5 CVs, while jobs for juniors – more than 20.

5% of jobs come from foreign countries.

On average, 76 from 1500 job vacancies are posted by foreign companies. Most of these jobs are from Ukrainian companies, who have their offices in other countries. Some of them propose an on-site IT job according to their current job agreement and some of them propose relocation to the foreign office.

But foreign companies also post their jobs in order to employ Ukrainian IT specialist. Most job offers come from such European countries, as Poland, Germany, Nordic countries, and also from Israel and UK.

Salaries are stable

If we’re checking salaries in the dollar terms, then we can say that salaries are not decreasing or increasing. The highest salaries are in Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv.

Conclusion

According to the forecast by Dou.ua, the Ukrainian IT market will keep growing in 2016, with increased gross wages, but it is also expected that taxes will increase as well. It’s possible that during the next 3 or 5 years Ukrainian IT will have almost the same taxes as other countries from Eastern Europe (15-20%).